Of this,
as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious.
As for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his
reflections on their old age, in all their harrowing pathos,
shall remain in the original for me. Horace has disgraced
himself to something the same tune; but what Horace throws
out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.
It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration in the
swift and sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the
strange revolution by which great fortunes and renowns are
diminished to a handful of churchyard dust; and in the utter
passing away of what was once lovable and mighty. It is in
this that the mixed texture of his thought enables him to
reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enchance
pity with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral
march. It is in this, also, that he rises out of himself
into the higher spheres of art. So, in the ballade by which
he is best known, he rings the changes on names that once
stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no more
than letters and a legend. "Where are the snows of yester
year?" runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he
passes in review the different degrees of bygone men, from
the holy Apostles and the golden Emperor of the East, down to
the heralds, pursuivants, and trumpeters, who also bore their
part in the world's pageantries and ate greedily at great
folks' tables: all this to the refrain of "So much carry the
winds away!" Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux
clattering their bones on Paris gibbet.
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